Reply To: Removing Old Entries From Database If You Have List of Field ID's

• timmy28x

• June 27, 2019 at 10:04 am

So all of my posts are now Gutenberg, and all old fields are now custom blocks, and all old data are now in the blocks and in the post content verses meta data.

I still have my old Field Groups enabled and not-deleted.

The field names are exactly these:

• intro-summaries
• tldr-box
• features-hero
• features-alt
• item-1-affiliate-link
• item-1-brand
• item-1-image-url
• item-1-bottom-line
• item-1-pros
• item-1-cons

The “item-1” ones have variants that say “item-2” and “item-3” as well.

There’s almost zero way that WordPress or myself have any other meta-keys that match these right? I’ve never used normal custom fields. Only ACF, and only Yoast. I doubt Yoast is using these.

So what should I do here?

1) My understanding is that if I delete the Field Groups, the data for these fields will still exist in the posts. Would they then be considered orphaned and a database cleaner plugin find them?

2) Alternatively, I understand that there’s something about going through your posts and deleting all these content in these fields, setting them to be blank. Does that then remove these entries in the database or are they still there but blank? If this will delete them then I’ll happily grind it out and make them blank in the post edit screen.

3) The third option is deleting the Field Groups and then running a SQL query on the database.

Can anyone guide me here to the surefire way to get rid of these entries that doesn’t involve me nuking my site? (I’d take a backup first of course).